John Hood

For the American Civil War General, see John Bell Hood. For the state representative, see John Hood (Tennessee).

Dr John Hood has been the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford since 5 October 2004. He is the first to be elected from outside Oxford's academic body; he was previously Vice-Chancellor of the University of Auckland. Born on January 2, 1952 in Napier, New Zealand, he attended Westlake Boys' High School in Auckland and later the University of Auckland where he studied engineering, before going on to win a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford (Worcester College), where he studied management. He played first-class cricket for Oxford University in 1977.

He has held a number of directorships in prominent New Zealand companies and bodies, including Fonterra, Fletcher Challenge and the New Zealand Cricket review of 1995.

His Oxford predecessor was Sir Colin Renshaw Lucas.

Dr Hood's appointment to Oxford was controversial; his first year in office did little to lessen this, since his attempts to make radical reforms in Oxford's administrative and academic systems met with much opposition, particularly due to concerns about the applicability of corporate models of governance in educational institutions. More recently there have been accusations of cronyism in appointments to senior management positions. Comparisons have been drawn with Lawrence Summers, the 27th President of Harvard University, who announced his resignation on February 21 2006 following two motions of censure. Although individual academic staff have been highly critical of John Hood there has been no formal motion calling for his resignation. However, an informal letter of confidence organised by his supporters in February 2006 attracted fewer than 50 signatories from Members of Congregation, a group numbering more than 3,000, and contested elections to the Council of the University by Congregation have resulted in the election of two leading critics of Dr Hood's proposals, namely Susan Cooper in 2005 and Nicholas Bamforth in 2006.

At the start of the 2006 academic year, there was controversy of his £197,000 salary and thirty-one percent pay increase.

He is the first vice chancellor of the 900-year-old university to have addressed the scholars' congregation via a webcast.

External links

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

John Hood

See also

External links